Editorial standards at major newspapers simply evaporated to accommodate screeds blaming everything from Sarah Palin’s political map, to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, to everyone who didn’t vote for Barack Obama for Jared Loughner’s crime. This wasn’t just an overnight media embarrassment – it started before the bodies were even cold, and it went on for months. “Climate of hate” was the media narrative.
A deep dive into the subscriber data by Annalee Newitz of Gizmodo suggests there were even fewer female subscribers than previously believed – in fact, she could only find evidence that about 12,000 out of 37 million total profiles belonged to “real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.”
CNN reports that U.S. military officials believe they have racked up another major ISIS leadership kill with a drone strike in Syria, presumably launched from the Incirlik airbase in Turkey. The top deputy of the Islamic State’s “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was taken out last week. The new target is British-born ISIS recruiter and hacker Junaid Hussain, who was linked to the gunmen who attacked the Mohammed Art Exhibit in Garland, Texas.
The Chinese market crisis has been described as a loss of investor confidence prompted by Beijing’s search for innovative new ways to control China’s economy.
Is Jorge Ramos exclusively entitled to commandeer events for his own theatrical performances, or is that everyone in media? Things will get a bit confusing if everyone gets to jump up and start yelling his talking points at the nominal featured speaker. Follow-up question: are all politicians required to stand quietly while the activist-journalists vent their spleens?
According to Agence France-Presse, the United States will accept between 5,000 and 8,000 Syrian refugees in 2016. This is a modest number when measured on the scale of mass migration – a veritable drop in the bucket compared to the tide sweeping through Europe – but still much larger than what Americans were previously told to expect by their government.
Few politicians have been handed a gift like the one Jorge Ramos of Univision gave Donald Trump. In one lightning-flash moment, Ramos became the avatar of everything law-abiding Americans despise about the political and media class, and the issue where they most clearly converge… blurring partisan lines to form a chorus that insists citizenship law is only kinda-sorta law. Our ruling class has sternly informed us that We the People have no say in the crafting or administration of immigration law.
Investors hope the U.S. and European markets are stabilizing after Monday morning’s free fall, but China’s stock market dropped again on Tuesday. It looks as if the parachutes are finally popping, as the AP reports the Shanghai Composite rallied from a 6.4% drop on Tuesday morning to a 4.3% loss by midday. This follows an 8.5% plunge on Monday, the worst performance in eight years.
The weekend’s crisis on the Korean peninsula ultimately ended with North Korea expressing “regret” over the severe injury of two South Korean soldiers by land mines in the DMZ, while South Korea agreed to turn off the propaganda loudspeakers that had infuriated the North and led to declarations that it was preparing for all-out war.
The man—who tried to attack passengers aboard a high-speed train to Paris only to be taken down and hogtied by courageous American, British, and French men before he could claim a single murder victim—has claimed he was only interested in robbing the train with some guns he happened to find in a suitcase in Brussels.
Furthermore, although Clinton has attempted to portray herself as everything from a “passive and unwitting” recipient of sensitive material to a fearless warrior on a one-woman crusade to reform silly classification rules, the Fox report makes it clear that only the intelligence agencies originating this information have the authority to declassify it, not anyone at the State Department – not Hillary Clinton, and most certainly not her top aide, Huma Abedin, who figures prominently in this story, and is looking more and more like the perfect stooge to take a fall for Clinton.
The Hungarians are responding to a record-breaking wave of “migrants” from the war zones of the post-Obama Middle East by constructing one of those border fences that’s supposed to be impossibly expensive and ineffective.
The government’s boasts of transparency and accountability stand revealed as toxic illusions. There is nothing “transparent” about answering pertinent questions years later. No one is held accountable at all, even though a strong case can be made that the politicized IRS tipped the 2012 election. Rest assured, that case would be made very loudly if this was the tale of a Republican president’s re-election campaign intimidating minority and environmentalist groups by slow-walking their tax-exempt applications.
Defeated railway jihadi Ayoub el-Khazzani has been claiming he wasn’t embarking on a murder spree at all, when he emerged from the bathroom of a high-speed train in France with an arsenal of weapons and 300 rounds of ammunition, only to be tackled and beaten senseless by heroic passengers.
French President Francois Hollande wasted no time expressing his nation’s gratitude to the American and British heroes who thwarted a jihad attack on a high-speed train on Friday, saving dozens of lives and delivering a hog-tied ISIS lone wolf to the French police.
One of the big problems with allowing an authoritarian communist/crony-capitalist regime to become a world financial leader is that they lie about everything. China’s long-concealed economic woes finally became impossible to hide, and we got a worldwide market panic that sent the
“Can I just say one quick thing?” Mr. Skarlatos asked, after Hall thanked him for his time. “It’s better to die like a lion than be slaughtered like sheep. And this terrorist coward deserved what he got, and the PC crowd needs to recognize terrorism for what it is.”
Florida state attorney Jeff Ashton, famed from the Casey Anthony murder trial, has admitted he was a subscriber to the Ashley Madison “dating” website… despite being a married father of six noted for his moralizing speeches.
The Canadians are suing because Ashley Madison failed to protect the privacy of its users. The suit directly references the service that charged clients an extra fee to completely and permanently delete their information, but clearly did nothing of the sort, since people who paid the fee are included in the client list posted online. This was, not coincidentally, the primary charge leveled by the Impact Team hackers who stole, and ultimately released, the Ashley Madison subscriber database.
The latest well-known name to appear in the database of clients for the Ashley Madison adultery website is Florida State Attorney Jeff Ashton, noted – not always with favor – from the Casey Anthony murder trial.
The hunt for the Bangkok bombers continues, with the authorities focusing on a male suspect caught on surveillance video dropping a backpack under a bench near the Erewan shrine and departing the area about fifteen minutes before the blast that killed 20 people and wounded over 120 others.
Egypt’s President Abel Fattah al-Sisi has announced he will make his third visit to Russia on August 25, when he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to “boost strategic relations” and “enhance cooperation with Russia in various fields, particularly economically.”
Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News sent some reporters to tour the Silvan district of Diyarbakir province in southeastern Turkey on Friday, after two days of fighting between Kurdish PKK separatists (or, more precisely, their “youth wing,” the YDG-H) and Turkish security forces.
It will come as no surprise that Internet scam artists, quick to take advantage of every public concern, are looking to prey upon those who fear their husbands or wives might be listed in the database of Ashley Madison clients disclosed by hackers.
The Associated Press reports that annual military exercises with South Korea have been halted–indefinitely–due to rising tensions on the DMZ and threats of war from Pyongyang. Is this a concession to North Korea’s threats, a bid to reduce tensions on the peninsula, or is it necessary to give American and South Korean units a chance to prepare for possible combat?
